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radeon HD 2600 no workie

09-01-2009, 09:45 PM

ok, I have a visiontek radeon hd 2600 agp and I cannot get it to work properly, I can get it to show my desktop with vesa, and the radeon driver, but I cannot get it to draw anything accelerated, and certainly can't get it to do any desktop effects. as it is now the desktop on the computer with this problem is so slow it's nearly useless.

I have tried a number of things and my latest round of head banging has been centered around trying to use the radeonhd driver, thinking that might work where others have failed.

Acceleration depends heavily on the drm driver. Did you build the drm yourself or are you using the one in the kernel ? If you are using the drm driver in the kernel you need 2.6.30 or higher, or a distro like Ubuntu 9.04 which backported 6xx/7xx 2D drm support to an earlier kernel.

Can you please pastebin your xorg log ?

Comment

sorry, I could have sworn I mentioned I was using kubuntu 9.04, but I guess I didn't, probably a useful thing to know. it is a fairly fresh install, but I've been doing a lot to it to try and get this working (I'm not opposed to reinstalling as I don't have much invested in this system yet)

honestly, I don't remember which specific driver I ended up with most recently that has sort of been working. I believe I am using the self built driver right now, I'm fairly sure I got to the point I am right now by purging all drivers I had and then following the instructions here (also how I ended up here)

I think I've managed to partially fix part of my problem, I think I've got some sort of direct rendering working, because it's no longer so slow that it's hard to use the computer, but I still can't get desktop effects and video is a lot better than it was but not to the point I can actually watch something for the entertainment value of it.

I have changed my conf since my last post, I'll try to stop being a moving target now that I have someone's attention

Comment

ok, that sort of fixed the no video thing, except it locks up now a few seconds after the login sound is played. I can still control it via ssh from another computer but I can't do anything directly to the machine. I managed to bring the system activity monitor up before it crashed and it's showing python using 85% cpu, showing active processes from ssh shows X using 93%

http://pastebin.com/m1e3dccdc
(the last lines of the log is repeated a billion times I omitted most of this)
my conf hasn't changed except I uncommented the bit about EXA

[edit]actually it seems to lock up when I try to do something, I just sat down on it after remotely rebooting it some time ago, and it worked fine until I clicked on the kickoff launcher, then it locked up. it seems trying to launch any kde application locks it down. bringing up the context menu on the desktop is fine, but if I select 'appearance settings' locks up.
when this happens I can still move the mouse, but it is extremely choppy, nothing else works.

Comment

even more interesting, it now does it with the live CD...
WTF, I chage the bios back and it still does it.

The next thing I would try is using the radeon driver (xf86-video-ati) and in the device section of xorg.conf put -

Option "BusType" "PCIE"

If it works, but you get a bit of font/graphical corruption you can add

Option "AccelDFS" "off"

If you really want to continue trying with radeonhd then I think you are going to have to keep trying different things with agp speed/aperture bios settings, 256 sounded like it was better, so maybe start with that and a lower speed.

In addition you could load the radeon module with the parameter no_wb=1 and see if that helps.

Comment

I'm actualy thinking the card might be bad. like I said, the problem I'm haveing is now showing up when I run the live CD with the vesa driver. and yeah I did undo the changes in my bios to see if that was the problem.

I already tried the ati/radeon driver, unless you are talking about a different one than I'm thinking

I'll try fiddling with the options you've suggested a little, though this is an AGP model not a PCIE. worst comes to worst the card is defective and I'll have to get a new one. do you have any suggestions in the $100 range that won't have the driver issues this one has had?